Month: April 2009

Today is D-day for the Boston Globe; the parent company New York Times has asked the unions to make concessions to stop the bleeding. The Boston Globe lost almost a million dollars a week last year and is on a pace to lose 85 million. The New York Times is has their own major financial problems. They recently have had to sell their building and rent space that they once owned. This is a problem for all newspapers as ad revenue moves to Internet and other streams. If the unions at the Globe will not concede on some issues then it is more than likely going to be a kill shot for another newspaper. The Boston Globe held a rally for support from local politicians to keep the paper alive. Senators Kennedy and Kerry have signed a letter claiming that the paper is an institution and needs to be saved. That is right a bailout for a newspaper, there was no official number of the supporters at the rally but there was one estimate of a couple of hundred people. We will watch and wait for what is next but May first could be the day the countdown to the end begins for the Boston Globe.

First day of summer 19 days
Terminator Salvation Movie Debut 21 days
Transformers 2 Movie Debut 56 days
Days until 2010 – 248 days
Day until a New President 1362 days

Sometimes I feel like I’m beating a dead horse
An I don’t know why you’d be bringing me down
I’d like to think that our love’s worth a tad more
It may sound funny but you’d think by now
I’d be smiling I guess some things never change
W. Axl Rose Dead Horse (1991)

Nielsen Online produced numbers that there are more people leaving Twitter then staying around. The claim is most people are not joining for more than a month. The number is higher than sixty percent of Twitter’s U.S. users don’t return a month later, based on an analysis of traffic trends. The flaw in the report is it only measure traffic on the Internet as opposed to blackberry, iPhone and other mobile devices. This numbers could be bogus as users sign up on the Internet and then use Twitter from a device. There is also another huge segment of Twitter users who just follow and do not post tweets but follow celebrity and retail twitters. The real numbers do not lie as Twitter has grown quite an impressive audience. In March, the San Francisco-based service attracted a U.S. audience of 13.9 million. The same time last year there were only 500,000 users. These numbers will even be higher in April as the Oprah/Kutcher/King race was adding new members as they pushed to be first to one million. This is a big issue as if Twitter cannot user interest, FaceBook and MySpace did not have this kind of issues retention numbers. They also had not seen this kind of growth.

We have a report that the faculty at Brown University have buckled under the pressure of student protest. The students think Christopher Columbus was a horrible person and there should be no holiday in his name. We will not even discuss the namesake of Brown University, The Brown family for which it was named made most of their money in the slave trade. The faculty has decided not to take off Columbus Day any longer. We thought this was a bold step except it is not internally true. They are not going to take off Columbus Day, but they will not be working that are taking off the newly created, Fall Weekend Day. Could they have come up with any lamer of a title? No wonder why Brown, an Ivy League school is forgotten and mention after Princeton. The old say is of you cannot get into Harvard or Yale there is always Brown. Once again, they have set the bar low enough they can hurdle it. This is once again political correctness run a mock. The bigger issue we have is if you are going to protest then do not take the day off, that is protest, to change the name of the day and still take it off is pathetic and weak.

Things are once again good at Sidwell Friends School. This is the Quaker private school located in Washington, D.C. as they offer pre-kindergarten through secondary school classes. The school was founded in 1883 by Thomas Sidwell. During the last eight years, President Bush girls were too old to attend the school during their time at the Whitehouse. The president before daughter Chelsea Clinton did attend the school starting as a twelve year old. President Barack Obama’s children now have begun to attend the Sidwell Friends School. They have a fundraiser that they can auction off the items donated from the parents. President Clinton used to give out standing gifts for this auction. One year he even offered 18 holes of golf with the president. This fetched quite a high price and each year the Clintons tried to out due the year before. This kind of skill is lacking with the new President as for his first gift for the auction was a magazine with his picture on it, which both he and his wife autographed. This is not going to get as much attention and monetary donation that the Clintons seemed to pride themselves on being able to raise to help the school.

We were fielding many emails on the subject so it became post worthy. Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania decided that he wants to be a democrat. He said that it was because he was going to lose a Republican primary election. He said he did not want to lose all he had built over 29 years in the senate. He would not be in the Senate if the Republican Party did not support him. He would not be 25% percent behind a challenger if he had not voted to support the stimulus. Did he really think passing a bill only three republicans voted for was going to have no repercussions? This is embarrassing as the democrats have promised a chair in a committee and they will treat him as if was always a Democrat. This lame stream media has jumped on this as a great thing by a great man. Do you remember when Joe Lieberman left the Democratic Party to be independent he was hammered, no bias though all in our head. It is to early to tell but if he was 25% behind in the polls, could he not still lose the election. We understand he is playing the filibuster card. He knows that if Pennsylvania democrats understand that making that seat democratic in the mid term elections could swing a majority, they will vote for him anyway. If this is the case, moveon, acorn, and George Soros will be out in full force pushing that message. We can only hope that the midterm election puts a couple more senators back in red seats and this is not an issue. That could leave Specter outside looking in, as Pennsylvania may want to send a real democrat instead of a pretender just looking to keep his job.

First day of summer 20 days
Terminator Salvation Movie Debut 22 days
Transformers 2 Movie Debut 57 days
Days until 2010 – 249 days
Day until a New President 1363 days

We love Twitter and everyday it is great to see new followers. There are people out there who want to get as many followers with out doing any work for it. Therefore, things like Hummingbird and Tweetergetter have been born. Our only problems is we would like to see the Tweeter folk use there Tweets with some idea of what is going around. This morning we received the same tweet four times, in thirty seconds about unleashing the potential of Twitter as a marketing tool. We expect this thing to be thrown around the web a lot today. We have posted a photo below and blacked out the user avatar and username. This is the funny thing about microblogging if you follow the same niche this kind of stuff has been happening more and more as Twitter explodes. Maybe Tweeter could start adding filters to panel and you could have an option to see a shortyURL displayed only once per update. It really does not happen much it was just funny when look at your panel of the twenty tweets displayed 20% are the exact same link with the same minute.

First day of summer 21 days
Terminator Salvation Movie Debut 23 days
Transformers 2 Movie Debut 58 days
Days until 2010 – 250 days
Day until a New President 1364 days

This week we highlight last year number 35 Heather Graham. Heather was born January 29, 1970, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She enrolled in extension classes at UCLA, during this time she was cast in the movie Diggstown, then she withdrew from school at UCLA to pursue acting full time and moved to Hollywood. She has done work on the big screen and small carving out a successful career for herself. She has appeared in over 40 movies and TV show since she began acting in 1984. We first came to see her in the role of Nadine in the 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. There are many classic roles and some of our favorite appearances are in the films, I Love You to Death, Six Degrees of Separation, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Swingers. We all agreed that her role in the movie Boggie Nights as Brandy the Rollergirl porn queen was awesome. She has received many award nominations worked on videos, been a 100 Beautiful Person on the People list, as well as herself in Sex in the City and the online game for EverQuest. She has been involved in many on screen sex scenes and shown a fair amount of skin through the years, including full frontal nudity. She is very attractive and smoldering on screen. She was an easy pick for a woman of the week.

First day of summer 22 days
Terminator Salvation Movie Debut 24 days
Transformers 2 Movie Debut 59 days
Days until 2010 – 251 days
Day until a New President 1365 days

We posted this week about the idea of having a work identity and a home identity and should they mix. We found out this weekend a woman from Zurich, Switzerland should have had two accounts on FaceBook. A Swiss insurance worker lost her job after surfing the social network site FaceBook while off sick, her employer said Friday. She called in sick saying she could not work in front of a computer as she needed to lie in the dark, but was then seen to be active on FaceBook, which her employer said destroyed their trust in the employee. The woman was using a FaceBook app on her iPhone in bed she claimed and accused her employer of spying on her and other employees by sending a mysterious friend request which they use to track employees on the site. There is way more to this story and more than likely her work ethic. We just thought it was another case of if you mix your business profile with a personal profile you run the risk of this exact kind of thing happening.

FaceBook will adopt new rules that will govern the social network even though a vote fell well short of a minimum. The new documents specify, among other things, that users own their information, not FaceBook. Only 640,000 of the FaceBook 200 million regular users voted over the past week, with nearly three-quarters in favor of the changes. FaceBook declared the result and was happy with vote of their first ever poll but the user community did not feel they did a poor job advertising the vote. When the TOS changed to claim that a photo posted to FaceBook account became their property it caused a backlash they had to do an about face on. This new release will let users keep their property when they delete an account the photos and remarks go with it. It will be interesting to see what other nuggets could be hidden inside as FaceBook gave ground on this one so they must have taken something else.

First day of summer 24 days
Terminator Salvation Movie Debut 26 days
Transformers 2 Movie Debut 61 days
Days until 2010 – 253 days
Day until a New President 1367 days

MySpace has tapped a former FaceBook executive as their new chief executive. Owen Van Natta, 39, will replace Chris DeWolfe, one of the co-founders of MySpace, who stepped down (forced out) as chief executive. While MySpace is still the largest social network in the United States, it has only 130 million users worldwide, compared with more than 200 million for Facebook. The good news for MySpace it make three times the revenue of FaceBook, through a partnership with Google. Van Netta spend about three years as chief operating officer and then as chief revenue officer, at FaceBook he had a history of being much more technologically innovative which could be the direction MySpace needs. Van Natta will report to Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s chief digital officer, who was named to the post April 1 and has made a name for himself already. We wonder if the next shoe to drop is on the other co-founder of MySpace Tom Anderson is his exit next?